3D-Animation of my Bookscanner

[Aegre Reminiscens]

Hey you!

I just made a 3D-Animation of my idea to build a bookscanner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GrI9UFD4uo

I would love to read some comments about my idea and tipps at which point my construcion may fail or has a weak point.
Waiting for your answers.

PS: The Camera and the Lights is just some 3D-Model downloaded at Turbosquid. I will shureley use another camera and another light.

Cheers
Aegre Reminiscens

[daniel_reetz]

Cool animation, I like it. Nice first post!

The one problem I see right away is your cradle doesn't support the spine of the book. Check out my build thread to see one way to solve this. Basically, if you just split your cradle into two halves, left and right, the spine of your book can rest on the surface under it.

Also, check out You1's build thread. His machine closely resembles yours, including the counterweight system.

Hope you share lots of pictures and experience from building this thing with the rest of us!

[Aegre Reminiscens]

The one problem I see right away is your cradle doesn't support the spine of the book.

Does this mean the left-right movement of the whole book to compensate the moving folding

(at the beginning, only a few pages are on the left side, and many pages are on the right side, so the cradle has to move to the right, to let the book match to the Glas-Corner ... later is has to move to the left...)

This Problem is solved, and even moddeled, but I was too lazy to animate this feature. You can see this, because the Cradle is on a second Baseplate. Below the second baseplate and the big baseplates are the same type of rails , that are used for drawers. These are cheap and I think they are good for this purpose.

Automatic Page-Turning

I thought a long time over this problem, but I think, I found a solution (not build, only an idea)

I think everybody saw this Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb6E4Hrgi9Y

The Pages are sucked via some kind of vacuum-cleaner-engine onto a corner. inside this corner is some kind of camera or scanner-device. Doesent matter for me. The whole thing is moving upwards and finally a small air blast is turning the pages over.

This is my idea: Ignore the scanning unit, and turn the pages with a vacuum cleaner, some thing to move the corner where the pages are sucked at and a small air-blast-thingy (perhaps use the exhaust from the vacuum cleaner)

This page-turning device must shurely be moved away from the book, to allow the Glas-Corner to get on the book to flatten the book for making the photo.

What do everybody thinks? I think one would only need 3 Axis (one for moving the Glas-V vertical, one for moving the page-turning-thingy vertical, and one thing for rotating the page-turning-thingy out of the way around a vertical axis (maybe even move it paralel to the Z-Axis)

Y-Axis = Vertical
X-Axis = Book Left/Right (not needed, moves automatically when the glas-corner is moved down)
Z-Axis = ... the other Axis

What does everybody think?

I think, this is a much more cheap solution than this stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyB5c3S4vzc They used a shitload of different axis and stepper-engines ... I think nobody is able to build this without studing rocket science and having thousands of dollars budget, several CNS-Mills ...

two things: this is just an idea to discuss, I have not yet started to build my first bookscanner ... so this might be a little early ... but this board is for discussion of ideas...
second: my native language is german, and my english is not so good, as I wish it was ... so dont wonder about strange descriptions, wrong words (with a onyl nearly matching meaning) wrong grammar ... I hope this is ok for you all ...

If there are better words to describe what I mean .. tell me!

Cheers
Aegre Reminiscens

[spamsickle]

Awesome animation. What did you use to do it?

I think Dan's talking about the space under the spine of your book, not about the cradle moving right-to-left as you scan. For many thin books, this isn't a serious problem, but with that 4-inch dictionary you have in your animation, it would probably be bending in the cradle if you tried to do it as you're showing in your animation.

Splitting the cradle into right and left pieces will work, and is something you should consider if you haven't yet built your scanner.

I just toss a length of PVC pipe into the "V" of the cradle under the spine of the book, and that both supports the book and allows it to shift as the pages shift from one side to the other. I posted some pictures in the original Instructables thread, but I don't have them available now. If it's not clear, let me know, and I'll make some new ones.

[Aegre Reminiscens]

I used Cinema4D R11.0 for the Animation and Rendering and Adobe Premiere CS4 for Editing the first and last 5 seconds, the Title and the Music.

This is a good point. I saw a nice solution in the Video of Daniel_reetz laser-cut portable scanner. With two seperated plates, that can be plugged into a series of small wholes in the base-plate. I thought about doing it this way, but I saw the video after doing my animation

[rob]

I saw a different video of that thing, and it didn't have the strobing flashes. I wonder what they are for? Anyway, when I saw the original video, I thought that they might have put in a line scanning element or two at the tip, and were scanning as the tip lifted. I wasn't sure whether they used cameras.

[spamsickle]

I also had the impression that they had scanning built into the tip of the page turner, rather than using cameras. I think maybe instead of a line scanner capturing a single scanline at a time, it may be an "area scanner" that captures a strip at a time. For instance, if it's a one-inch wide capture area, it would only need to illuminate the page after the scanner/turner had moved an inch. That could account for the strobing. The line scanners in my flatbed scanners illuminate constantly, but I can imagine it would save power (and add drama) to strobe the illumination if the scanner pulled in more than a single scanline.

Of course, I'm only speculating; I haven't seen one outside of YouTube, or talked to anyone who knows how they work.

[Aegre Reminiscens]

Hey,

I would like to discuss this Idea, I have posted in this Threat earlier:

Automatic Page-Turning

I thought a long time over this problem, but I think, I found a solution (not build, only an idea)

I think everybody saw this Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb6E4Hrgi9Y

The Pages are sucked via some kind of vacuum-cleaner-engine onto a corner. inside this corner is some kind of camera or scanner-device. Doesent matter for me. The whole thing is moving upwards and finally a small air blast is turning the pages over.

This is my idea: Ignore the scanning unit, and turn the pages with a vacuum cleaner, some thing to move the corner where the pages are sucked at and a small air-blast-thingy (perhaps use the exhaust from the vacuum cleaner)

This page-turning device must shurely be moved away from the book, to allow the Glas-Corner to get on the book to flatten the book for making the photo.

What do everybody thinks? I think one would only need 3 Axis (one for moving the Glas-V vertical, one for moving the page-turning-thingy vertical, and one thing for rotating the page-turning-thingy out of the way around a vertical axis (maybe even move it paralel to the Z-Axis)

Y-Axis = Vertical
X-Axis = Book Left/Right (not needed, moves automatically when the glas-corner is moved down)
Z-Axis = ... the other Axis

What does everybody think?

I think, this is a much more cheap solution than this stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyB5c3S4vzc They used a shitload of different axis and stepper-engines ... I think nobody is able to build this without studing rocket science and having thousands of dollars budget, several CNS-Mills ...

two things: this is just an idea to discuss, I have not yet started to build my first bookscanner ... so this might be a little early ... but this board is for discussion of ideas...
second: my native language is german, and my english is not so good, as I wish it was ... so dont wonder about strange descriptions, wrong words (with a onyl nearly matching meaning) wrong grammar ... I hope this is ok for you all ...

If there are better words to describe what I mean .. tell me!

Cheers
Aegre Reminiscens

[daniel_reetz]

It might be easier to discuss if you made some drawings, and one thing that definitely gets people talking around here is: building something, even if it doesn't work the first time. How hard would it be for you to try turning just one page with air? If you can get a page turner going, that would be a big deal.